you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can't bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that's flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don't think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it's hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn't well rounded or something and you don't want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can't really answer by yourself
Whether human beings can ever actually live together in large-scale settled societies without class distinctions.
I've heard a 70-something anthropologist argue that human nations can't exist beyond ~20,000 people; anything more than that becomes mass society, in which class is inherent 🤷♂️
In a recent chapo episode Adam McKay talks about reading that Homosapiens beat Neanderthals by using storytelling to organize more people. I think a lot of theorizing about socioeconomic structures is trying to do a similar thing but with class, so I think that 20,000 number is not fixed, in the same way.
Ya, that’s interesting! I’d only offer that Homo sapiens didn’t so much beat Neanderthals, as co-exist and interbreed for thousands and thousands of years before ‘pure’ Neanderthals went extinct :)
And I think the point this anthropologist was trying to make is that there’s an evolutionary unit called a ‘nation’, which is different from how nations are modernly conceptualized in the age of nation-states
The premise is that true 'nations' are federalized inter-personal relationships. Like, how in the ‘nation’ called Canada, there were ~500 Indigenous nations. The state-building process of colonial canada required nationalism, so it generated a false sense of nationhood that couldn’t possibly, truly exist across so much space, and so many disparate people. Not in terms of a ‘federation of real human relationships’ sort of way. Which is why people ae so extremely different in different regions, with fundamentally different politics, language, and cultural worldviews.
That’s the theory, anyway. That, just as there’s a limit on how many people a human can have relationships with, so is there a limit on the size of a ‘nation’. Which is why there are distinct ‘national’ identities throughout the state of California say, or even the boroughs of New York, and why there seems to be so much conflict between the 20,000 ‘nations’ that make up the united states.
It’s largely a pedantic argument around what ‘nation’ means, I suppose, but I think there’s some value in it :)
The Soviet Union managed to get pretty close to that didn't they?
I guess it's also important to distinguish between economic well-being (poverty, etc.) and class. There were definitely places in the USSR that were much poorer than others, but were there people who had more inherent power other than politicians and people famous for their work?